Villatoro noticed a hint of a smile on the sheriff’s mouth, a whisper of relief, as if this was the only good news he could convey.
“That’s right,” he said. “We’re blessed in our community to have plenty of retired police officers who have worked situations like this before. They have years of experience, and they’ve volunteered their services to the department and the community.”
“That’s great,” the reporter said, beaming.
Carey nodded. “They’re working tirelessly, without compensation. We’ve greatly expanded the scope of our investigation with the service of these men, and we’re proceeding in the most professional way possible.”
The reporter threw it back to the anchor, who closed the story by saying: “The volunteers are reportedly retired police officers from the Los Angeles Police Department…”
Villatoro paused, a hamburger poised in the air. He wondered how many ex-cops had volunteered to form the task force. And besides Newkirk, who were the others?
AFTER CHECKING his watch and assuming she was still awake, he called his wife, Donna. She picked up quickly, and he visualized her in bed, under the covers with her knees propped up and a book open. He apologized for not calling the night before, and she told him how his mother was driving her crazy.
“Where are you again?” she asked. “Ohio? Iowa?”
“Idaho,” he said gently. “Almost in Canada.”
“Isn’t that where potatoes come from?”
“I think so, yes. But not this far north. Here there are mountains and lakes. It’s very beautiful, and very…isolated.”
“Would I like it?”
“For a while, I think. There’s not much shopping and not many places to eat.”
He told her about the missing children, and she said she thought she’d seen something on the news about it. But it could have been other missing children, she said. It was such a common story these days, she said. So many missing children it was hard to keep up with them.
Donna was Anglo. In the last ten years she had put on a great deal of weight and was constantly fighting to slim down. Villatoro had told her, repeatedly, truthfully, that it didn’t matter to him. His mother had made the situation worse, though, when she announced at breakfast two weeks before that she was making them a new comforter for their bed. “I decided it will be a light one,” his Salvadoran mother had said, “because big people create their own heat.” Donna had been mortified, and had been depressed ever since.
“Have you heard from Carrie?” he asked, inadvertently glancing at the framed photo he had brought of their family. Their daughter, their beautiful, dark, loving daughter, was going to college, majoring in cinematography. Her departure had left a hole in the house that Donna and his mother couldn’t fill.
“An e-mail,” Donna said. “She needs money for some kind of film club.”
“Then send it to her,” he said automatically.
He listened while Donna replayed her day: breakfast with Mama, grocery shopping, fighting with the dry cleaners. The city had turned off the water for two hours that afternoon while repairing the street.
He realized, too late, that she had asked him a question while his mind was elsewhere.
“What?”
“I asked you when you thought you’d be back.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “A few more days. I have a feeling I’m getting close. It’s more than a feeling, in fact.”
“You’ve said that before.” She sighed.
“This time, though…”
“This obsession, it’s not healthy.”
It was more than an obsession. They had had this discussion many times before.
“Why is this so important to you?” she asked. “You need to find out what it’s like to be retired. You haven’t even tried yet.”
“I’m not ready.”
“I talked to the Chows down the street,” she said. Arcadia was 50 percent Asian. “Mr. Chow retired a month ago and they just bought a big RV. They’re going to tour the country. They’re like a couple of kids, they’re so excited.”
“Is that what you think we should do?”
Hesitation. “No, not really.”
He faked a laugh, hoping to defuse the topic. He had explained it before to her. She had said she understood. But if she did, it didn’t stop her from bringing it up again.
For eight years since the robbery, he had lived with the case. It was the only open murder investigation within the department, and it had been his responsibility. Retirement didn’t change that. Villatoro had always taken his responsibilities seriously, even if no one else seemed to take theirs with the same passion. He took good police work seriously, and considered it a calling, like the priesthood. He knew most of his fellow officers didn’t think that way, and he never could understand that. They would have been just as happy and content working as building inspectors or within the city’s recreation department.
He had been shocked when his chief agreed to turn over the investigation to the LAPD and assigned Villatoro a peripheral liaison role in it. The officers he dealt with from L.A. were much more interested in going to Santa Anita and betting the horses than they were in solving the murder of the guard. The L.A. detectives treated their very few days in Arcadia like holidays from their offices, with long lunches, story-telling, and very few questions for him. This bothered Villatoro on two counts. One was that despite the convictions of the racetrack employees, the men who murdered the guard had never been caught. The detectives didn’t seem very concerned about that. They were used to messy, unfinished cases. To them it was about putting in their time, filing a few reports to grow the file, winning a couple of races at the track. The other thing that consistently bothered Villatoro-in fact, it ate at him like a cancer-was that these men were the vanguard of a sprawling, dirty, indefinable city that continued to grow, continued to reach farther out, overwhelming small communities like Arcadia and sucking them in until what remained had no resemblance to what there once was. He saw his fellow officers and neighbors change to adapt, lowering their standards, letting their responsibility to the community and each other slip away into the maw of the beast. Arcadia was no longer the small, sun-baked city it had once been. Now, it was just another colony.
Villatoro was a proud man, despite his humble nature. He noticed how the L.A. cops shot glances at one another when he spoke, was stung when they disregarded his suggestions about following up on the marked bills. One of the detectives, after being told about the second bill traced back to Idaho, said, “Do you have any idea what my caseload is like? Get fucking real, man.”
Villatoro reflected on what he’d said to his wife, and decided he’d been wrong. It wasn’t that he wasn’t ready to retire. He was. But the single unsolved murder was like a hot coal in his belly. It burned. He had told Donna this.
There was the widow of the slain guard, and her children. No one-not the prosecutors, not the judges, not the L.A. detectives-had met the widow, as Villatoro had. She deserved justice, and only he could deliver it.
He told his wife good night and that he loved her.
HE SAT BACK on his bed with the television on but the volume turned down, and thought of his last visit to Santa Anita Racetrack.
He had done it yearly, ever since the robbery, long after the L.A. detectives stopped going to Arcadia pretending to investigate. He chose days when no races were held, when the old, stately place was still and silent. The last time he had been there was the week before, on an unseasonably hot day, ninety-four degrees in April.
Parking his car in the huge, empty lot, he had walked across the hot asphalt with beads of sweat forming on his upper lip. The stadium was blue and massive; heat shimmered and distorted the palm trees and the hills that framed the track. He had loved the place, the feel of it, ever since he took his daughter there for equestrian events during the summer of 1989. It had the look and feel of lost elegance, of a fifties Los Angeles that was bursting with energy, pride, and money. A gentler, more civilized, more humane time, when the issues were water and wider highways and Arcadia had been a sleepy, tree-lined village, like Kootenai Bay was now.